Wikia Search finally canned

Wikia Search, pitched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as a Google killer when it launched in January 2008 is no longer.

Wales wrote in a post that Wikia Search “has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped” and then blamed the economy for the demise.

Wikia Search failed to find an audience, which in turn meant that it failed to establish a credible search index. The idea was to take Wikipedia crowd sourcing to search, so search results were edited and inserted by users. Things started to look bad in August last year, when Wikia launched a toolbar that allowed users to scrape results from Google; as I wrote at the time, providing a tool that encourages users to use a competing search engine (one that was claimed would be killed) reeked of desperate times.

Wales says that he may return to search again in the future, but we wouldn’t count on that being any time soon.